He often parked his maroon Corvette at the church, but he also had a Jaguar and two high-performance Mercedes SLS AMGs, each worth at least $200,000 and capable of speeds approaching 200 mph. He spoke of his big-screen TVs and the latest computers.

Congregants figured extra income from personal investments paid for the sweet life, but he was actually an embezzler, church leaders say.

He died this month at 59, apparently of natural causes, just weeks after they discovered he had stolen at least $491,000 since 2010, according to a San Antonio police report and a church lawyer. It might be closer to $750,000.

His victims might include friends, the Bexar County district attorney's office says.

Church members knew Meyers was a convicted felon, but didn't press for details — the congregation believes in second chances.

Now, the once prominent megachurch's future is in jeopardy. Harvest Fellowship once was a prominent North Side megachurch with a 2,000-plus Sunday attendance. Now, with attendance down to 150, the congregation is grieving the loss of a beloved member and absorbing the shock of his betrayal.

Members “understand the emotional turmoil is really hard to deal with,” said Interim Pastor Darrell Lindsey. “This is somebody lots of people were friends with and obviously trusted.”

San Antonio police and the FBI closed their investigations of Meyers upon learning of his April 6 death of natural causes. Church officials said he confessed shortly before dying. They have retained a law firm and are filing an insurance claim but believe that Meyers spent the money and that his estate's assets are limited.

Meyers had been the church's finance director since 2006.

“A lot of people were caught off guard because he was a firm and established member of the church,” said Matthew Countryman, an attorney for the church whose firm is sorting through records to understand the scope of the damage.

Evidence of embezzling surfaced late last year, church leaders said. Meyers was battling an illness and missed the deadline to get end-of-the-year donation reports to congregants. The church leaders took over this duty, chalking up his procrastination to illness, but discovered financial discrepancies.

“We just thought he was behind,” Lindsey said. “I really didn't want to believe this could be happening.”

Discovering problems

On April 10, church leaders held the first of two congregational meetings.

Meyers manipulated the payroll system but leveraged his role to bilk the church out of a variety of funds, a church news release states. Harvest Fellowship was already overhauling its constitution and bylaws, and the discovery prompted new financial safeguards.

Several staff members — not just one — handle money now, and employees must undergo a more thorough background check.

A check of Meyers' past would have revealed he was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison in 1993 for defrauding eight elderly people in New Jersey of nearly $300,000 he had promised to invest. He was released from a halfway house in 1995.

Three years later, he was convicted in Bexar County for presenting himself as a lawyer, resulting in a $1,000 fine and three years of probation. That got him returned to federal custody in 1999, and Meyers finished his sentence at a halfway house in June 2000.

“We were aware of his past, but he wasn't exactly truthful about that, either,” Lindsey said. “He had a great reputation. That's probably the hardest part of all of this. We trusted him. And folks can say, 'How can you trust him?' Well, he was great at manipulating people. ... And now we can see that.”

A church elder has reached out to Meyers' widow, Tina Waters Meyers, who is still a church member but has not been attending services lately, Lindsey said. The couple married in 2000.

“He was a good man and had a good heart,” she said in a brief phone interview. “He was always there to help people at the church. ... He was my best friend. I loved him. I still love him.”

'A place like that'

Meyers considered himself a “Messianic Jew,” a disputed term describing a Jewish convert to Christianity. He had a New Jersey accent and tough exterior, said a former Harvest Fellowship member of more than 10 years who asked for anonymity, citing the sensitive nature of the matter.

Under the gruffness was a soft heart, the source said, and most friends called him “Len” or “Lenny.” He wore casual clothing, but his money went to big-ticket items that he slipped into small talk, said the source, who found herself wondering “how he could work at the church and have those toys.”

But Harvest Fellowship was known for taking in those with imperfect backgrounds and has helped countless people by this nonjudgmental approach, she said, adding, “This is what the church is, a place where you go because you need God. Hopefully it'll always be a place like that.”

Stuart Fabricant, who leads a local Messianic congregation that held services at Harvest for three years, worked with Meyers on a church board and bumped into him only two months ago at a restaurant.

“I cannot conceive in reality that he would be involved in embezzlement,” a stunned Fabricant said. “It doesn't hold true to the man I knew.”

Meyers had told him of his criminal past “but not in great detail,” Fabricant said. “We who are believers, a lot of us come out of the past — drug abuse, alcoholism, womanizing and on and on. And when you accept the Messiah, those things are forgiven. ... But unless you spend a lot of time together, you really don't know people.”

Harvest Fellowship's founding pastor, Peter Spencer, was an actor and movie producer whose small congregation in the early 1990s bought the former Fiesta Dinner Playhouse. The nondemoninational, evangelical church flourished there. Its school at one time had about 500 students.

But when Spencer resigned in the early 2000s, the church began to lose members. It closed the school in 2005. Pastor John Cannon, under whose tenure Meyers was hired as finance director, resigned last year, and the church sold its seven-acre campus and paid off debt.

Last fall it suspended a nationwide search for a permanent senior pastor. By year's end, its lease on the property will expire and it will need to relocate.

Spencer said he remembered Meyers' name but wasn't close to him. “I pray they pull out of it,” he said of the church.

The church is left to deal with two kinds of damage.

“To some degree, everybody agrees it's money we thought we should have and didn't know we had it,” Lindsey said. “So we're no worse off than a month ago, from a money perspective.”

“This isn't about the money,” he added. “God provides for us and always has. The serious struggle is the emotional issue and understanding forgiveness.”